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Jan 23, 2009 03:29 PM | 4
Hard to believe it's been 25 years since Apple's slick TV spot, which aired during the third quarter of an otherwise forgettable Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Washington Redskins, ushered in the era of the Macintosh. The commercial depicts a drab future for humanity (in which, for some inexplicable reason, everyone is bald) a la George Orwell's 1984, featuring rows of gray-clad people complacently listening to "Big Brother" on a telescreen until a woman dressed in bright orange shorts rushes into the room, smashing the tedium with a well-placed throw of her Olympic-style hammer. (YouTube, of course, has the clip if you care to reminisce.)
This commercial, which ran two days before Apple's Macintosh hit the market, was a harbinger of the company's larger-than-life (and highly successful, for the most part) approach to selling technology. The first Macintosh was the original all-in-one personal computer, featuring a nine-inch (22.9-centimeter) monitor, floppy disk drive and eight-megahertz Motorola 68000 microprocessor sitting in a beige plastic tower. Its price tag: $2,500.
Apple trotted out the Mac as the successor to its $10,000 "Lisa" desktop computer, introduced in 1983. Lisa more processing power and held more memory than the Mac, but it was too pricey to compete with IBM's PC (introduced in 1981) and the various IBM-compatible clones of that technology made by Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and others. The Mac was a paired down version of Lisa designed to challenge the IBM and its clones for domination of the burgeoning desktop computer market. (It lost.)
Apple's early miscues aside, the Mac was an innovative piece of equipment. It had a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse that were both originally developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) but made famous by Apple and its outspoken leader, Steve Jobs. The Mac also came with MacPaint graphics software and the MacWriter word processing program.
Despite their stylish design, rich color pallet and innovative features, Macs suffered in the late 1990s from the overwhelming success of Microsoft's Windows 95, a GUI that finally could compete with Apple's user interface and ran on PCs that cost hundreds of dollars less than the Mac. Apple's PC market share quickly shriveled to about 4 percent by 2002, author Merrill Chapman points out in his book "In Search of Stupidity," although the more recent success of its MacBook laptops and iMac PCs have lifted Apple's market share to about 8 percent of the U.S. market, MercuryNews.com reports.
Image courtesy of Grm wnr
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4 Comments
Add CommentAs I recall, the Mac went on sale on January 24, 1984. I still have the one I bought on January 30, and as far as I know, it still works. I think I'll dig it out and fire it up tomorrow.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this- Dennis Brothers
The Sinclair QL also appeared in 1984, costing £400, containing a word-processor, spread-sheet system, programmable database, and had scalable colour graphics and a superb procedural basic to enable you to write your own programs. The operating system inspired Linux. This april the user group will be celebrating 25 years of compatibility, as 50% of its membership still use the original machine...How many '85 PCs are still functioning?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJanuary 25th, 1984: The day Bill Gates found his calling. The first day he actually used his, now famous, photocopier.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEverything from Windows 3 on is a direct derivative of the Mac OS.
Like it or not, without the Mac, there would be no XP, Vista, or Win 7. You'd still be a C:
Ahhh ... those were the days. Like brothers and eco-steve's e-mail above, I too have those wonderful machines (including an old Osborne 1 & Apple Lisa). The best part is every couple of years, I bring them out to play with, yes they all still work. The Osborne still has the game ZORK on it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe best part is, in 1982 I was a XEROX employee that had an Alto on, & under my desk, connected to the ethernet and to the predecessor to the laser printer. So for me, I've been a part of this wonderful history of the GUI interface.